How to configure MX Protect

MX Protect will provide a queuing system for your incoming email, if your own mail server should go offline for any reason. It will keep hold of all emails sent to you until it detects that your mail server is back online, at which point it will deliver them all. It also gives you an added layer of protection with our comprehensive virus and spam scanning.

Once logged into your Control Panel, click on your domain (if you have more than one), and look for the Email Settings drop-down menu.

Select the option Users and Email Rules.

From the menu on the left, click on the link MX Protect/Standby.

You will now be taken to the page shown below.

You will first need to enter either the IP Address or Hostname of your mail server. This will be the destination that MX Protect will deliver any queued emails to.

You next need to decide whether to enable virus protection, and we recommend that you do.

The next part is to decide whether you want to enable spam filtering, and we again recommend that you do.

If you enable it then you will be able to enter an email address that will be used to receive any spam emails. There are a couple of rules regarding this:

• The email address cannot be on the same domain that MX Protect is active on
• The email address cannot be an external email address

In other words, it needs to be located on another domain you have with us, which doesn’t have MX Protect active on it.

You can also enter some text to add to the start of the subject if you wish.

The final option on this page provides two slider bars, as below.

Emails that receive a spam score at least equal to the lower threshold will be treated as spam. Of those, any emails with a spam score at least equal to the upper threshold will be delivered to whatever the configured spam destination is. Emails that are greater than the upper threshold will be deleted entirely and not delivered anywhere.

With the default settings, as shown in the screenshot above, that means the following:

• Emails with a spam score of below 6 will not be regarded as spam
• Emails with a spam score of between 6 and 22 will be regarded as spam, and delivered to your spam destination
• Emails with a spam score of 22 or higher will be deleted entirely and not delivered anywhere

To complete the process of configuring MX Protect click on the Save button in the bottom right.

Note: MX Protect will only work if you have purchased the service and your domain’s MX records are pointing to the two MX Protect servers: mxprotect1.hosts.co.uk and mxprotect2.hosts.co.uk